Putting Everyday Cruelties in Focus

Over the past few years Harrison Atelier, a design collective led by the husband-and-wife team Seth and Ariane Harrison, has eased its way into the dance world with collaborations with choreographers like Jonah Bokaer and Silas Riener, both former Merce Cunningham dancers. But while Mr. Bokaer’s work is all about control and optimal efficiency, Mr. Riener, unafraid of fraying seams, shows a wilder side.

In “Veal,” Harrison Atelier’s new installation of sculpture, music and dance performed at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, on Thursday, Mr. Riener is the choreographic source. But he’s only a sliver of this creative pie; the concept, design and direction are by Harrison Atelier.

Partly inspired by the Greek myth of the flaying of the satyr Marsyas as well as the book “Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight,” in which the author Timothy Pachirat went undercover to work at a slaughterhouse, this opaque production loosely explores ideas about animal cruelty, the battle between nature and technology and, ultimately, the role humans play.

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Veal Silas Riener, center, with Cori Kresge, left, and Rashaun Mitchell in a collaboration with Harrison Atelier at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.CreditAndrea Mohin/The New York Times

“Veal” is split into two sections that repeat. The color of your ticket dictates program order: a white one means the production starts with a musical performance — the dreamy score is by Loren Dempster— and a black one with a dance. (Mine was white.)

Of the five installations four involve sculptures that are also used as instruments. In one a contraption meant to evoke a lyre features strings with doughnut-shaped ceramic objects hanging inside vertical frames. The musicians and conductor wear black aprons — a nod to a slaughterhouse garb — but the uniform effect is pretentiously over the top: they could be working at Maison Martin Margiela.

The soprano Julie Haagensen and the countertenor Biraj Barkakaty move woodenly from site to site singing brief arias. Their indistinct diction, perhaps a result of their voices being overmiked, is less frustrating the more you catch Mr. Harrison’s lyrics: “Its body used to make a sound, instrumentalized in life, instrumented to death.”

While dancers enter this musical world briefly — they wander through the space like zombies — the main dance chunk takes place in a smaller gallery in the back. Like animals trapped in a pen Mr. Riener, Rashaun Mitchell and Cori Kresge run laps wearing transparent latex. Mr. Riener captures the essence of the awkward body with balances that teeter precariously and thrashing arms, but as a whole his choreography ends up melodramatic.

Still, Harrison Atelier needs Mr. Riener and his feral abandon more than he needs its frame and stilted direction. For all its Greek mythology and slaughterhouse references “Veal” has little theatrical vitality. When moments of spectacle do occur — for example when Mr. Riener hangs upside down from a loop of plastic suspended from the ceiling with his ribs showing ominously against his skin — it’s hard to decide if the moment is chilling or cheap. He gets his point across too clearly: He’s just another piece of meat.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: Putting Everyday Cruelties In Focus. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe